In the new Archi­tec­tur­al Digest video above, Michael Wyet­zn­er talks about a fair few build­ings we’ve fea­tured over the years here on Open Cul­ture: the Impe­r­i­al Hotel, the Ennis House, Tal­iesin, Falling­wa­ter. These are all, of course, the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, who still stands as the embod­i­ment of Amer­i­can archi­tec­ture more than 65 years after his death. That’s a fair­ly long stretch by mod­ern stan­dards, but nev­er­the­less a short­er one than Wright’s career, which ran over 70 years. Dur­ing his long life, Wyet­zn­er explains, Wright wit­nessed the intro­duc­tion of indoor plumb­ing, elec­tric­i­ty, the tele­phone, the auto­mo­bile, the air­plane, the radio, tele­vi­sion, and space trav­el — and even giv­en that, his archi­tec­ture shows a dra­mat­ic evo­lu­tion.

Begin­ning with Wright’s appren­tice­ship in Chica­go under Louis Sul­li­van, “the father of mod­ernism,” Wyet­zn­er con­tin­ues on to his devel­op­ment of the hor­i­zon­tal indoor-out­door “Prairie Style” house; his Japan­ese com­mis­sions and sub­se­quent much-pho­tographed Los Ange­les hous­es; the emer­gence of his phi­los­o­phy of “organ­ic archi­tec­ture” meant to uni­fy the build­ing with its site and nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment; his dis­cov­ery of the desert; and his Depres­sion-era con­cep­tion of the “Uson­ian house,” which adapt­ed his refined spa­tial sen­si­bil­i­ty for Amer­i­can-style mass pro­duc­tion. This would be more than enough for even the most dis­tin­guished archi­tec­t’s career. Yet it does­n’t even get around to such projects as the Uni­ty Tem­ple, John­son Wax Head­quar­ters, the R. W. Lind­holm Ser­vice Sta­tion, the Solomon R. Guggen­heim Muse­um, or his first and last dog­house.

No mat­ter which peri­od of Wright’s career you exam­ine, you can find evi­dence for his belief in the inspi­ra­tion of place, in organ­ic aes­thet­ics, in struc­tur­al expres­sive­ness, and even in indi­rect moral instruc­tion. Yet it’s also pos­si­ble to imag­ine that, in some sense, a series of dif­fer­ent Frank Lloyd Wrights exist­ed, repeat­ed­ly destroyed and recre­at­ed by pro­fes­sion­al set­back, per­son­al dis­as­ter, for­eign sojourn, immer­sion in a new land­scape, or even acquain­tance with a new tech­nol­o­gy. Sure­ly no one could remain pro­duc­tive to the end of his 92 years with­out a lit­tle re-inven­tion. Dur­ing that time, he designed more than 1,000 projects, only about half of which were ever built. Young archi­tects who idol­ize Frank Lloyd Wright would do well to remem­ber that he, too, knew full well the sting of nev­er mak­ing it to con­struc­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Frank Lloyd Wright Became Frank Lloyd Wright: A Video Intro­duc­tion

Frank Lloyd Wright Cre­ates a List of the 10 Traits Every Aspir­ing Artist Needs

That Far Cor­ner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Ange­les – A Free Online Doc­u­men­tary

Frank Lloyd Wright: America’s Great­est Archi­tect? – A Free Stream­ing Doc­u­men­tary

What Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unusu­al Win­dows Tell Us About His Archi­tec­tur­al Genius

What It’s Like to Work in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Icon­ic Office Build­ing

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The Cit­i­group Cen­ter in Mid­town Man­hat­tan is also known by its address, 601 Lex­ing­ton Avenue, at which it’s been stand­ing for 47 years, longer than the medi­an New York­er has been alive. Though still a fair­ly hand­some build­ing, in a sev­en­ties-cor­po­rate sort of way, it now pops out only mild­ly on the sky­line. At street lev­el, though, the build­ing con­tin­ues to turn heads, placed as it is on a series of stilt-look­ing columns placed not at the cor­ners, but in the mid­dle of the walls. A vis­i­tor with no knowl­edge of struc­tur­al engi­neer­ing pass­ing the Cit­i­group Cen­ter for the first time may won­der why it does­n’t fall down — which, for a few months in 1978, was a gen­uine­ly seri­ous con­cern.

This sto­ry, told with a spe­cial explana­to­ry vivid­ness in the new Ver­i­ta­si­um video above, usu­al­ly begins with a phone call. An uniden­ti­fied archi­tec­ture stu­dent got ahold of William LeMes­suri­er, the struc­tur­al engi­neer of the Citi­corp Cen­ter, as it was then known, to relay con­cerns he’d heard a pro­fes­sor express about the still-new sky­scrap­er’s abil­i­ty to with­stand “quar­ter­ing winds,” which blow diag­o­nal­ly at its cor­ners. LeMes­suri­er took the time to walk the stu­dent through the ele­ments of his then-ground­break­ing light­weight design, which includ­ed chevron-shaped braces that direct­ed ten­sion loads down to the columns and a 400-ton con­crete tuned mass damper (or “great block of cheese,” as it got to be called) meant to coun­ter­act oscil­la­tion move­ments.

LeMes­suri­er was a proud pro­fes­sion­al, but his pro­fes­sion­al­ism out­weighed his pride. When he went back to check the Citi­corp Cen­ter’s plans, he received an unpleas­ant sur­prise: the con­struc­tion com­pa­ny had swapped out the weld­ed joints in those chevron braces for cheap­er bolt­ed ones. His office had approved the change, which made sense at the time, and had also tak­en into account only per­pen­dic­u­lar winds, not quar­ter­ing winds, as was then stan­dard indus­try prac­tice. Per­form­ing the rel­e­vant cal­cu­la­tions him­self, he deter­mined that the whole tow­er could be brought down — and much in the sur­round­ing area destroyed with it — by the kind of winds that have a one-in-six­teen chance of blow­ing in any giv­en year.

It did­n’t take LeMes­suri­er long to real­ize that he had no choice but to reveal what he’d dis­cov­ered to Citi­corp, whose lead­er­ship coop­er­at­ed with the accel­er­at­ed, semi-clan­des­tine project of shoring up their gleam­ing emblem’s struc­tur­al joints by night. The work could hard­ly fail to draw the atten­tion of the New York press, of course, but it received scant cov­er­age thanks to an impec­ca­bly timed news­pa­per strike, and on its com­ple­tion made the sky­scraper per­haps the safest in the city. In fact, the sto­ry of the Citi­corp Cen­ter dis­as­ter that was­n’t only came out pub­licly in a 1995 New York­er piece by Joseph Mor­gen­stern, which made LeMes­suri­er a kind of hero among struc­tur­al engi­neers. But it was the stu­dents who’d iden­ti­fied the build­ing’s faults, not just one but two of whom came for­ward there­after, who per­son­i­fied the life-sav­ing pow­er of ask­ing the right ques­tions.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How This Chica­go Sky­scraper Bare­ly Touch­es the Ground

New York’s Lost Sky­scraper: The Rise and Fall of the Singer Tow­er

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.